User Data Leaked From Analytics Company Social Blade

Social Blade, an online analytics company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, was hacked earlier this month and its users’ details, including passwords, have been leaked online.

Social Blade provides data on YouTube and Twitch video channels and Instagram accounts with the goal of helping users grow their online presence. According to LeakedSource, someone hacked Social Blade’s website and forum and leaked the details of 13,009 forum users and 273,086 website users.

The compromised information includes email addresses, usernames, user IDs, password hashes and IP addresses. The hackers also obtained YouTube, Instagram and Twitter authentication tokens for thousands of users, along with analytics data.

According to LeakedSource, the forum passwords were stored as MD5 hashes with a unique salt for each user, while the website passwords were stored using a custom implementation of SHA512, but without a unique salt. This makes it easy for an attacker to crack most passwords.

An analysis conducted by LeakedSource showed that the most common passwords found in the leak are “123456,” “123456789,” “socialblade” and “password.”

Social Blade has confirmed that its website suffered a security breach. The company said attackers obtained a partial database dump that included IPs, email addresses and hashed passwords by exploiting a vulnerability in the forum software.

“Upon learning about the incident, we immediately patched the security issue by making the conscious decision to remove our forum entirely,” the company said in a security notice published on its website on Wednesday.

The company has decided to reset all user passwords as a result of the incident. The company’s forum displays a “permanently closed” message. Before it was shut down, the forum had just over 26,000 members and it had been using version 4.2.3 of vBulletin.

The Social Blade breach is fairly small compared to the other incidents disclosed by LeakedSource over the past few months. The list of victims includes VerticalScope (45 million users impacted), VK (100 million), Myspace (360 million), Dota 2 (2 million) and Tumblr (65 million). The leaked credentials have also been used to launch password reuse attacks.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.